What are your staples?

Since finding steepster accidentally just 3 days ago, I feel like I’ve been exposed to an entirely different universe of teas and flavors and information. It’s been an exciting, intriguing, and envy-filled experience. I find myself looking at others’ orders and saying “i NEED to have some of that…”

But as I’m in the midst of cutting down expenses, I’ll be building my collection very slowly. So I’m trying to see, which are the teas I’ll always want around, my staples, and which are teas I can just keep small portions of, or cycle out.

Right now, my staples would be:

Organic Cold 911- DavidsTea
Paris- Harney & Sons
And any good Earl Grey (right now I have Teavana, but I just realized I’m in love with EG and Yssah is sending me a bunch of samples, so we’ll see if that staple changes)

Staples, in my mind, are the (relatively) inexpensive teas you can find locally and stock plentifully. My can’t-live-withouts are basic black breakfast teas: PG tips loose leaf, Yorkshire Gold in bags, and usually some form of Assam and/or Irish breakfast. For decaf, straight-up bulk peppermint, chamomile, and rooibos, which you can blend six ways to Tuesday. I’m always a big cheerleader for buying in bulk at local groceries or health food stores when you can.

A good stout breakfast tea from the UK: http://www.pgtips.co.uk/. Pretty readily available in the US, both bagged and loose, though I’ve only seen their regular variety locally — not decaf or special flavors. (Though I’d love to try their decaf. I have yet to meet an unflavored decaf black tea that was strong enough to suit me.)

i also asked this question so there’s a thread on it….but there’s an even older thread on the same topic (started 10 months ago) and it’s interesting to see how much steepsterites’ staples changed in less than a year :D

I will always have a predominantly ginger herbal tea in my stash, current ones are Ginger Sage Winter Spa Blend by Verdant and Super Ginger by DavidsTea, also always have some variety of Jasmine Silver Needle white tea, and one really good flavored rooibos. Oh, and I always need to have a dark Dancong oolong in stock for my Yixing teapot :)

This is a lovely question as I was pondering what is ‘staples’ foundation or columns holding the bldg together. Anyhow, since finding Steepster.com I became one of those irrational tea drinkers in that I was trying everything since I was not accustom to drinking loose leaf teas.

This year I am trying to rid myself of many impulses; one of which is random tea drinking. I have always liked green teas. I like matcha tea as well. So in answer, my staple teas are green teas and matchas.

That being said, I woke up today wanting to have Peaches’n’Cream by Barnie’s Coffee and Tea Company. I am sure there is rhyme with reasoning to what I do. Or that split personality disheveling. A very good question, thank you for asking. ;-)